The origin of the professions

Abstract

The term, "profession" first appeared in the 16th Century, applying to the so-called learned professions of theology, law and medicine. A profession consists of a range of characteristics: "prolonged, specialized, intellectual training, a technique, either scientific or institutional, based on natural science or study of human institutions, remuneration for professional service in the form of fee and not salary, a sense of responsibility to the client, formation of associations to test competence and maintain ethical codes." The research objective of this chapter is to investigate critically the sources of regulation of the professions. Licensure is a procedure for screening candidates for admission to a profession, to review the qualifications of existing practitioners, to work to establish ethical standards, to maintain, advance and enhance the profession's standards, and to assure fair dealing with the members of the public. The professional licensing of members originated in the gilds of the middle-ages. Admission to the gild was the equivalent of modern licensure and was the gild's specific monopoly. The phases and terminologies of modern professional education still follow much the organizational skeleton of the medieval gilds and professions. Freedom of the city of London could be acquired only by one of the original three pathways of patrimony, apprenticeship, or by redemption from the court of aldermen. Pulling wrote that from ancient Saxon times the power of conferring the freedom of the city was independent of the crown. People not free of the city were designated as foreigners or strangers, in accordance with the ancient law of Rome. The freedom of the City of London was essential for commercial activity. Up to 1835, every person who wished to become a city freeman first had to become a freeman of one of the City. The research question asks how professional recognition is structured, and for what purposes. Argument seeks to sustain the view that maintenance of societal hegemony has been the purpose of the professions since the times of the middle ages gilds. The research paradigm is psychoanalytic, in that it deploys both historiographic method and historical narrative analysis in order to construct its syntheses. In today's western capitalist state, the bourgeois rule by both domination and by hegemony, where domination is rule by force and hegemony is rule by consent, coordinated by professional advice to subaltern masses, a transmission of bourgeois ideology, where the advice is set up to have essential value to them. The "historical bloc" is a structural conception that coordinates society just as a king used to do, by use of references to bundles of myths as historical forces. Now, the dominant bourgeoisie must form a unified ideology to articulate this unified ideology to the masses and project onto them what they have learned in their years of higher education. When the masses nevertheless fail to consent, either actively or passively, the state exercises coercive power over them by legally enforcing discipline onto such recalcitrant groups. Similarly, the king had power to create and dismantle professions, by means of proceedings in quo warranto. The freedom of the city was the device by which the right to make a professional level of living was enforced. Through this process and structure, the mercantile gilds became today's hegemonic professions. The historical bloc forming a superstructure to keep these professional groups in this hierarchy was public fear of deceit in the trades. © 2023 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.